Examine monitoring tools and technologies
Continuous monitoring of applications in production environments is typically implemented with application performance management (APM) solutions that intelligently monitor, analyze, and manage cloud, on-premises, and hybrid applications and IT infrastructure.
These APM solutions enable you to monitor your users’ experience and improve the stability of your application infrastructure. It helps identify the root cause of issues quickly to prevent outages and keep users satisfied proactively.
With a DevOps approach, we also see more customers broaden the scope of continuous monitoring into the staging, testing, and even development environments. It's possible because development and test teams following a DevOps approach are striving to use production-like environments for testing as much as possible.
By running APM solutions earlier in the life cycle, development teams get feedback about how applications will eventually do in the production and take corrective action much earlier. Also, operations teams advising the development teams get advanced knowledge and experience to better prepare and tune the production environment, resulting in far more stable releases into production.
Applications are more business-critical than ever. They must always be up, always fast, and constantly improving. Embracing a DevOps approach will allow you to reduce your cycle times to hours instead of months, but you must keep ensuring a great user experience!
Continuous monitoring of your entire DevOps life cycle will ensure development and operations teams collaborate to optimize the user experience every step of the way, leaving more time for your next significant innovation.
When shortlisting a monitoring tool, you should seek the following advanced features:
- Synthetic Monitoring: Developers, testers, and operations staff all need to ensure that their internet and intranet-mobile applications and web applications are tested and operate successfully from different points of presence worldwide.
- Alert Management: Developers, testers, and operations staff all need to send notifications via email, voice mail, text, mobile push notifications, and Slack messages when specific situations or events occur in development, testing, or production environments, to get the right people’s attention and to manage their response.
- Deployment Automation: Developers, testers, and operations staff use different tools to schedule and deploy complex applications and configure them in development, testing, and production environments. We'll discuss the best practices for these teams to collaborate effectively and efficiently and avoid potential duplication and erroneous information.
- Analytics: Developers need to look for patterns in log messages to identify if there's a problem in the code. Operations need to do root cause analysis across multiple log files to identify the source of the problem in complex applications and systems.